Both Taiwan and China are extremely populous nations that, due to population pressures and continuing high growth levels, have experienced challenges in sustainable development. Hsu illustrates Taiwan's path toward sustainable development and contrasts it to that of China, suggesting ways in which Taiwan can help China implement its environmental and social policies, and in which China might help Taiwan continue its path toward sustainable environmental and social policies. She explains that although Taiwan is a small compared to China, some aspects of its development model can (and should) be scaled up for larger countries. The importance of regulation enforcement is clear regarding Taiwan's environmental protection program, as is the promotion of small and medium sized enterprises in promoting income and social equality. Similarly, China's experimental methodology - using small areas to explore different ways of living or different technologies - can be useful in Taiwan. In Lessons in Sustainable Development, Hsu examines China and Taiwan in terms of inequality and environmental issues.

This book is a continuation of Corporate Law and the Theory of the Firm: Reconstructing Corporations, Shareholders, Directors, Owners, and Investors. The author extends his analysis of contract law, property law, agency law, trust law, and corporate statutory law and applies that analysis to defy conventional concepts and theories in economics, finance, investment, and accounting and expose the artificial boundaries established by decades of research founded on indefensible assumptions and fallacious conclusions. Using the Humpty Dumpty principle, where words mean what the authors want them to mean, economists have created "strange new worlds" where contract law, property law, agency law, and corporate statutory law no longer apply. The author dismantles the theory of the firm by proving the theory of the firm wilfully and intentionally ignores fundamental contract law, property law, agency law, and corporate statutory law. Contrary to the theory of the firm, shareholders do not own corporations, directors are not agents of shareholders, and shareholders are not investors in corporations. The author proves that by property law and corporate law, capital is not privately owned by capitalists but by corporations. Entire economic and social systems have been constructed that have no basis in law. With the advent of publicly traded corporations, the capital is there, but both capitalists and capitalism have been rendered extinct. This book will appeal to researchers and graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in economics, finance, accounting, law, and sociology, as well as legal scholars, attorneys and accountants.

Dwindling innovation and deteriorating economic conditions are caused by a major force, a systemic shift in the American economy. In this gripping book, Dr. Samli makes the case that the US economy is shifting for the worse, tilting towards a finance-driven economy, and argues that investing in innovation will bring us out of the recession and back to a successful, market-driven economy. While the US is cost-cutting by sending jobs abroad, reducing education budgets, and redirecting government funds to military involvement, American innovation has been suffering and stifled. Dr. Samli explores the roots of the recession from this viewpoint and offers an 'innovative' solution for disciplining economic, political, and social activities to come out of the recession and restore the tilt towards the 99-percent.

From the mid-1880s a shopkeeper movement developed in Milan, centred around a shopkeeper newspaper, a federation of shopkeeper trade associations, and a shopkeeper bank. In 1904 shopkeeper representatives initiated a sequence of events that led to the fall of the first radical-socialist administration within the city. The author explains these events with reference to the business of shopkeeping itself. He analyses the trades, techniques, tax structure and topography of the Milanese retail sector, and traces the history of the contest between shops and cooperatives and the shopkeeper's changing relationship with his employees and with his clientele. The final chapter confronts the crucial question of why the Milanese shopkeepers were to be found on the political right in the years leading up to the Fascist takeover. This is the first book to deal with any aspect of the Italian petite bourgeoisie.

This book is about accounting in an alternative libertarian socialist economic system. It explores what information and transactions we need to enable democratic and effective financial decisions by those affected by the decisions. Based on the economic model, participatory economics, the author proposes a set of accounting principles for an economy comprised of common ownership of productive resources, worker and consumer councils, and democratic planning, promoting the model’s core values. The author tackles questions such as how accounting could be organised in an economy with no private equity owners or private lenders and creditors that is not based on greed and competition but instead on cooperation and solidarity. A large part of the book is focused on issues regarding investments; thus, he asks how and on what basis decisions are made about the allocation of an economy’s production between consumption today and investments that enable more consumption in the future, and how investments are accounted for. He also considers how investments in capital assets and production facilities would be decided, financed, and valued if they are not owned by private capital owners and if allocation does not take place through markets but through a form of democratic planning. In answering these questions and more, the author demonstrates that alternative economic systems are indeed possible, and not merely lofty utopias that cannot be put into practice, and inspires further discussion about economic vision. By applying accounting to a new economic setting and offering both technical information and the author’s bold vision, this book is a comprehensive and valuable supplementary text for courses touching on critical accounting theory. It will also appeal to readers interested in alternative kinds of economies.

The marginalist theory of the corporation or firm, whose characteristics were formally developed in the 1930s, represents a major change in the development of traditional economic theory. In this book, David Schrader, a philosopher of economics, discusses the rise of the marginalist conception of the firm in the context of economic thought over the past two centuries, and explains why economists continue to defend a theory with demonstrable shortcomings: the marginalist view of the firm retains its support not through any comparative advantage in empirical or predictive power, but by virtue of its being a part of the predominant marginalist economic program.

Ensuring equity in healthcare is the main concern of health policymakers in order to provide a sustainable health system. This concern is more prominent in developing countries due to the scarcity of resources. This book provides a comprehensive analysis and discussion on the distributive pattern of out-of-pocket pharmaceutical expenditures under the health reforms in Turkey and makes comparisons with pharmerging countries. Turkey's health reforms began in 2003 to address shortcomings related to financial protection and to improve health outcomes and the quality of healthcare services. The primary motivation was to ensure equity in the distribution of health resources, and this transformation process led to profound changes in how these resources were used, and in health financing in general. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the long-term effect of health reforms on the distribution patterns of health expenditures and health service use. This book offers a thorough equity analysis of the health financing system, affected by this health transformation program. Index and curve approaches are used in the equity analysis of pharmaceutical expenditures. The book examines the long-term effects of health system regulations on the health spending characteristics of households and improves the current understanding of equity in this context. It includes extensive international comparisons of healthcare services across a range of developing countries and highlights the significance of ensuring equity for emerging economies. The author explores the existing evidence as well as future research directions and provides policy and planning advice for health policymakers to contribute to establishing a more equal health system design. Additionally, the book will be of interest to scholars and professionals in the fields of health economics, public health management and health financing.

This book is about accounting in an alternative libertarian socialist economic system. It explores what information and transactions we need to enable democratic and effective financial decisions by those affected by the decisions. Based on the economic model, participatory economics, the author proposes a set of accounting principles for an economy comprised of common ownership of productive resources, worker and consumer councils, and democratic planning, promoting the model's core values. The author tackles questions such as how accounting could be organised in an economy with no private equity owners or private lenders and creditors that is not based on greed and competition but instead on cooperation and solidarity. A large part of the book is focused on issues regarding investments; thus, he asks how and on what basis decisions are made about the allocation of an economy's production between consumption today and investments that enable more consumption in the future, and how investments are accounted for. He also considers how investments in capital assets and production facilities would be decided, financed, and valued if they are not owned by private capital owners and if allocation does not take place through markets but through a form of democratic planning. In answering these questions and more, the author demonstrates that alternative economic systems are indeed possible, and not merely lofty utopias that cannot be put into practice, and inspires further discussion about economic vision. By applying accounting to a new economic setting and offering both technical information and the author's bold vision, this book is a comprehensive and valuable supplementary text for courses touching on critical accounting theory. It will also appeal to readers interested in alternative kinds of economies.

Economic theorizing suggests that firms can acquire and maintain market dominance in a number of ways. Some economists argue that firms attain dominance only by being relatively more efficient than their rivals and retain leadership only by staying more efficient than their rivals. Others argue that efficiency is not the only source of dominance and that leaders can retain preeminence even if they are inefficient. This book attempts to sort out the relevant points by exploring market dominance experienced by firms in ten different industries. It examines factors that led to acquiring, holding and in some cases losing dominance and asks whether those factors were consistent with economic efficiency.

The results suggest that both schools make valid points. Generally, firms that rose to dominance were market pioneers and did so using economically-efficient strategies. In some cases, however, firms rose to dominance using inefficient strategies. Once they reached their ascendance, these firms engaged in a number of strategies, some efficient, others inefficient, to maintain their dominant positions.

Most of the firms examined eventually lost their dominance. In some cases, the market evolved too rapidly for any firm to maintain control. In other cases the fall was ushered along by federal antitrust and trade policy. In still other industries, it was due either to poor management or the firm becoming inefficient. However, even when some of these dominant firms became inefficient, the market system worked only very slowly to remove them.

The analysis has specific implications for antitrust policies toward dominant firms. Because the sources and consequences of dominance can be varied, neither a DEGREESIlaissez faire DEGREESR policy in favor nor a DEGREESIper se DEGREESR injunction against dominance is called for. A reasoned approach, tempered by underlying market conditions, is warranted toward the strategies used to acquire and maintain dominance.

Using data from the World Values Survey, this book sheds light on the link between happiness and the social group to which one belongs. The work is based on a rigorous statistical analysis of differences in the probability of happiness and life satisfaction between the predominant social group and subordinate groups. The cases of India and South Africa receive deep attention in dedicated chapters on cast and race, with other chapters considering issues such as cultural bias, religion, patriarchy, and gender. An additional chapter offers a global perspective. On top of this, the longitudinal nature of the data facilitates an examination of how world happiness has evolved between 1994 and 2014. This book will be a valuable reference for advanced students, scholars and policymakers involved in development economics, well-being, development geography, and sociology.

This textbook is a comprehensive introduction to applied spatial data analysis using R. Each chapter walks the reader through a different method, explaining how to interpret the results and what conclusions can be drawn. The author team showcases key topics, including unsupervised learning, causal inference, spatial weight matrices, spatial econometrics, heterogeneity and bootstrapping. It is accompanied by a suite of data and R code on Github to help readers practise techniques via replication and exercises. This text will be a valuable resource for advanced students of econometrics, spatial planning and regional science. It will also be suitable for researchers and data scientists working with spatial data.

Neuroeconomics has emerged as a paradigmatic field where neuroscience and the social sciences are integrated in one analytical and empirical approach. However, the different disciplines involved often only relate to each other via the shared object of research, and less through the constructing of precise models of integrative mechanisms. Social Neuroeconomics explores the potential of philosophical and methodological reflections in the neurosciences and the social sciences to inform those efforts at cross-disciplinary integration, with a special focus on recent contributions to mechanistic explanations. The collected essays are drawn from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, economics, sociology and philosophy, and examine the ways and methods of constructing unified conceptual frameworks that can guide empirical work and hypothesis building. This is demonstrated in a range of applications, particularly regarding finance and consumer behavior. The concept of the 'social brain' is also explored; a multilevel framework in which complex analytical categories such as emotions or socially mediated cognitive processes connect neuronal and social phenomena in specific mechanisms that generate behavior. This book addresses a wide audience across the various disciplines, reaching from the neurosciences to the social sciences and philosophy.

Electoral promises help to win votes and political candidates, or parties should strategically choose what they can deliver to win an election. Past game-theoretical studies tend to ignore electoral promises and this book sheds illuminating light on the functions and effects of electoral promises on policies or electoral outcomes through game theory models. This book provides a basic framework for game-theoretical analysis of electoral promises. The book also includes cases to illustrate real life applications of these theories.

This textbook articulates the elements of good craftsmanship in applied microeconomic research and demonstrates its effectiveness with multiple examples from economic literature. Empirical economic research is a combination of several elements: theory, econometric modelling, institutional analysis, data handling, estimation, inference, and interpretation. A large body of work demonstrates how to do many of these things correctly, but to date, there is no central resource available which articulates the essential principles involved and ties them together. In showing how these research elements can be best blended to maximize the credibility and impact of the findings that result, this book presents a basic framework for thinking about craftsmanship. This framework lays out the proper context within which the researcher should view the analysis, involving institutional factors, complementary policy instruments, and competing hypotheses that can influence or explain the phenomena being studied. It also emphasizes the interconnectedness of theory, econometric modeling, data, estimation, inference, and interpretation, arguing that good craftsmanship requires strong links between each. Once the framework has been set, the book devotes a chapter to each element of the analysis, providing robust instruction for each case. Assuming a working knowledge of econometrics, this text is aimed at graduate students and early-career academic researchers as well as empirical economists looking to improve their technique.

There are few industries in modern market economies that do not manufacture differentiated products. This book provides a systematic explanation and analysis of the widespread prevalence of this important category of products. The authors concentrate on models in which product selection is endogenous. In the first four chapters they consider models that try to predict the level of product differentiation that would emerge in situations of market equilibrium. These market equilibria with differentiated products are characterised and then compared with social welfare optima. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between horizontal and vertical differentiation as well as to the related issues of product quality and durability. This book brings together the most important theoretical contributions to these topics in a succinct and coherent manner. One of its major strengths is the way in which it carefully sets out the basic intuition behind the formal results. It will be useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in industrial economics and microeconomic theory.

Public procurement affects a substantial share of world trade flows, amounting to 1000 billion euros per year. In the EU, the public purchase of works, goods and services has been estimated to account on average for 16 percent of GDP. The novelty of this book is that it focuses on the new European Union Directives approved in 2014 by the EU Parliament. The book consists of original contributions related to four specific themes of interest to the procurers' day-to-day role in modern public purchasing organizations - both economists and lawyers - allowing for relevant exchanges of views and "real time" interaction. The four sections which characterize the book are Life-cycle Costing in Public Procurement; Calculating Costs and Savings of Public Procurement; Corruption and Probity in Public Procurement and Public Procurement and International Trade Agreements: CETA, TTIP and beyond. These themes have been chosen for their current relevance in relation to the new European Public Procurement Directives and beyond. The original format features, as is the case with the first three volumes, an introductory exchange between leading academics and practitioners, from differing disciplines. It offers a series of sequential interactions between economists, lawyers and technical experts who supplement one another, so as to enrich the liveliness of the debate and improve the mutual understanding between the various professions. This essential guide will be of interest to policymakers, academics, students and researchers, as well as practitioners working in the field of EU public procurement.

Originally published in 1984 Theories of Welfare looks at theories of social administration developed in different social science disciplines. The book ranges widely and gives concise coverage to the historical and intellectual background in which the theory emerged, the implicit or explicit value assumptions, and account of the most important theoretical concepts and the major criticisms of them, an indication of the relevance to social administration and a guide to further reading.

This study illustrates the social and political principal that institutions matter. It explores not only how to get institutions to work efficiently, but also how to assess the proper relationship between institutions and development challenges through evaluative techniques.

Market Analysis for Real Estate is a comprehensive introduction to how real estate markets work and the analytical tools and techniques that can be used to identify and interpret market signals. The markets for space and varied property assets, including residential, office, retail, and industrial, are presented, analyzed, and integrated into a complete understanding of the role of real estate markets within the workings of contemporary urban economies. Unlike other books on market analysis, the economic and financial theory in this book is rigorous and well integrated with the specifics of the real estate market. Furthermore, it is thoroughly explained as it assumes no previous coursework in economics or finance on the part of the reader. The theoretical discussion is backed up with numerous real estate case study examples and problems, which are presented throughout the text to assist both student and teacher. Including discussion questions, exercises, several web links, and online slides, this textbook is suitable for use on a variety of degree programs in real estate, finance, business, planning, and economics at undergraduate and MSc/MBA level. It is also a useful primer for professionals in these disciplines.

A comprehensive presentation of the use of economics in judicial decisions, the book is structured to provide all the foundational concepts that are important for the application of economics to the development and interpretation of statutes that emanate from economic conditions. The diversity of the economic field defines the scope of the book and its relevance to the study of law and rule adjudication. Beyond the positive dimensions of law and economics, the book evaluates the normative aspects of law and economics when laws are imprecise, and markets are inefficient. The ethical scope of transactions and rule adjudication are further considered in the context of professional ethics and the rationale for ethical considerations in the practice of law and economics. It presents a unique analysis of law, finance, and economics, by taking a look at the intricate quantitative requirements that are essential for scientific knowledge in the courtroom and the international dimensions of the practice of law and economics beyond municipal frontiers. It alerts entrepreneurs to risk exposures in the global economy and provides foundational information for readers who are also interested in international law and economics, and the essence and interpretations of international conventions appertaining to money, expropriation, the environment, and investments in international financial markets. This book is a useful reference for both undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in law and economics, forensic economics, corporate white-collar crime, and legal studies. It is also valuable for certificate programs for paralegals who wish to have a basic understanding of economic and financial concepts.

The Informal Economy: Measures, Causes, and Consequences provides a comprehensive account of the economics of informality through the lenses of various economic perspectives. Although informal economic activity is widespread all around the world, many issues around its nature and consequences remain largely under-explored or unresolved. Most importantly, the evidence presented in the existing literature on informality has failed to generate a consensus on the measurements, causes, and effects of the informal sector among researchers. Most, if not all, of the empirical results are inconclusive or dependent on the nature of the dataset used in the analysis. This book aims to address that gap by exploring different definitions and measures of the informal economy, including different perspectives, then subjecting these measures to a battery of empirical tests to examine the determinants and effects of informality. Through this analysis and an extensive review of the literature, the book explores many of the economic, political, and social factors of the informal economy including the relationship between informality and the tax burden, tax enforcement, and institutional quality. This key text makes for compulsive reading to scholars and students interested in the informal or shadow economy.

A comprehensive presentation of the use of economics in judicial decisions, the book is structured to provide all the foundational concepts that are important for the application of economics to the development and interpretation of statutes that emanate from economic conditions. The diversity of the economic field defines the scope of the book and its relevance to the study of law and rule adjudication. Beyond the positive dimensions of law and economics, the book evaluates the normative aspects of law and economics when laws are imprecise, and markets are inefficient. The ethical scope of transactions and rule adjudication are further considered in the context of professional ethics and the rationale for ethical considerations in the practice of law and economics. It presents a unique analysis of law, finance, and economics, by taking a look at the intricate quantitative requirements that are essential for scientific knowledge in the courtroom and the international dimensions of the practice of law and economics beyond municipal frontiers. It alerts entrepreneurs to risk exposures in the global economy and provides foundational information for readers who are also interested in international law and economics, and the essence and interpretations of international conventions appertaining to money, expropriation, the environment, and investments in international financial markets. This book is a useful reference for both undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in law and economics, forensic economics, corporate white-collar crime, and legal studies. It is also valuable for certificate programs for paralegals who wish to have a basic understanding of economic and financial concepts.